Amphetamine Logic
by The USS Ficcelsior
Summary: They really should have spent more time firewalling their external ports.


" _And to think… I hesitated."_

\- Egon Spengler

* * *

GAESTOHN VOLGSMAASHAR WAS A MIGHTY FOE. His appearance could be described as a giant stone gargoyle who had shed most of his demonic traits so he take up a new life as a Viking lord, or a 15-foot-tall Viking who fostered aspirations of becoming a terrifying gargoyle. His entire body was made of quivering, magically animated rocks. His bronze cap was decorated with fossilized antlers. His coarse grey beard, hanging down to his belt, flowed like quicksand. The eyeholes that had been etched into his rocky face were filled by two massive glowing rubies. And every time he smashed the ground, he did so with an enormous two-handed club: A marble column with a boulder firmly tied to the end. Each swing contained the full strength of his biceps, which were even more broad and solid than the column itself.

The ancient stone temple may have been the oldest location Fidel's team had discovered, but the evidence made it clear that they were not the first interplanetary travelers to land in this remote corner of the universe. The flat stone floor where they were fighting was surrounded by tall white columns engulfed in overgrown weeds. The lintels formed four sides of a square, and on top of that narrow frame were countless statues of female figures from every known point in history, like a pantheon of goddesses standing against the clear blue sky above the temple. Each one proudly stared down to the temple floor in a different heroic pose. A small but athletic monk posed next to a bulging Amazonian woman. A slender rogue posed next to a voluptuous magician. A short priestess knelt beside an average-built cyberpunk belle.

The Viking struck the ground with his club just as Fiore dodged out of the way. More cracks sprung out from the epicenter and snaked through the marble floor. The party members retreated to more stable ground each time the cracks moved toward their feet. The marble could have given away entirely and send them plummeting into the earth below if they didn't avoid the cracks.

Sword strikes from Fidel and Victor did nothing against the stone giant. Anne couldn't get close enough to land a single kick. Emmerson's crossbow shots only took tiny chips off the monster's body. He seemed slightly affected by Miki's and Fiore's magicks, but not enough to hinder his constant brutal attacks.

While the giant was occupied trying flatten Emmerson underneath his club, Fiore hopped across the cracks and stopped at a safe vantage point behind the rest of the adventurers. She upped her game by going straight to the end of her mental spell tome and casting the most powerful spell at her disposal: Final Dystopia.

A small black fleck appeared in the air behind the stone Viking. The fleck instantly imploded on itself and spawned into a five-five-foot-wide black hole, and the anomaly continued to grow wider by the second. The moment the event horizon brushed the Viking's jagged shoulder blades, he lost his grip on his club and staggered forward in pain. A direct hit.

The giant's ruby eyes began to glow with even more enchanted raged than before. He took his club back in one hand and turned toward the expanding black hole. Making a horrific sound that was like a human battle cry, a panther roar, and the sound of a cataclysmic earth quake all at once, he threw his bare arm upward and uppercut his fist straight through the bottom of the black hole. It instantly exploded into six identical smaller anomalies.

Fidel and his team tried to avoid it. They made every effort to flee for their very lives, but the miniature black holes closed in on each one with hyper-magnetic force. The black holes hovered over each party member's head and slammed down over them, sinking halfway through the ground and sealing the adventurers like guinea pigs in clear black domes. Their screams echoed off the temple columns as every individual cell in each of their bodies slowly suffered.

Like a silent executioner, the Viking grasped his club by both hands again and delivered the single killing blow. He pounded an unbroken spot on the temple floor, creating a new branch of cracks that stretched in six different directions, intersected with the cracks that had been left earlier, and created continuous paths that traveled straight under the feet of each person in Fidel's team.

The world shattered like a house of mirrors. The temple didn't crumble. The land where the temple sat didn't collapse into the core of the planet. The fabric of reality itself was destroyed and something nightmarish assumed its place.

The new world was made of neon and darkness. A thin layer of the ground was made of glowing interlaced lines that extended infinitely into the empty void, leaving the suggestion of a perfectly flat geometric landscape. The sky was simply black nothingness. The only sound that could be heard was a constant low, electrical whir that echoed from somewhere far away in the endless distance. In a single flash, the most ancient location in the universe had become the most futuristic. But this was even beyond futuristic. This may have been the ending point of the entire space-time continuum.

Fidel's party took on a new form that was just as bizarre as the world. They were little more than naked, faceless, and hairless outlines of their individual persons. Every intimate contour—male and female—was visible as a bare mesh, along with the outlines of their rounded ears (in Miki's case, triangular half-elf ears) and a vague indication of their facial features, but the physical aspect was completely missing. Each of them had been caught in a similar defensive posture with their bodies crouched and their arms clenched over their heads when the first universe changed, but now they were slowly standing up and looking around with body language that indicated shock. They came to realize they were no longer paralyzed in negative space or in pain, but something still kept them from moving from the spots where they stood.

Each member of the party was trapped in their own isolated existence, unable to see or hear the teammates standing just next to them. But one after another, they gradually looked in the same direction. What they _could_ see, aside from the infinite gridscape that extended in every direction against utter blackness, was the creature they had just been battling. In his native form.

It was a massive wireframe figure whose only resemblance the fearsome Viking lord was its exaggerated ape-like proportions. Its x-ray outline was made of almost completely straight lines, giving it the profile of a giant metal drum than had grown massive cylindrical arms and short round legs. Hovering in the empty space over its head was the name "SYSGUARD_004" in blocky script.

The only feature still visible on the stone creature's face was a chilling one. Instead of the two rubies for eyes, it now had a single beaming laser sight in the center of its head. No matter where someone was standing, it always looked like the wireframe creature's pulsating retinal was staring directly at them from their perspective.

The party members started looking down at their feet at roughly the same time.

The gridscape underneath them was covered with winding electrical currents. The currents matched the same pattern as the cracks that had created in the temple's marble floor. In all, there were six complete networks that started at the wide base of the x-ray monster and ended wrapped around the ankles of the wireframe adventurers.

The current that led to Fiore began to glow slightly brighter than the others.

From the moment she had arrived in the holo-world, Fiore's appearance differed ever so slightly from her allies. Her wireframe had the same bald and faceless features as the rest, but she technically wasn't completely in the virtual nude. Every few seconds, a bright purple outline of her magic garments would flash on like geometric runes painted directly over her gridline curves. Then they would flash back off like a neon street sign clinging to its last cathode.

At the moment the mysterious connection to Fiore grew brighter, the purple diamonds separated from one another and gradually drifted of the witch's shapely wireframe body. They hovered in the air for a second, and then burst into bright violet shards. The shards rapidly flew across the grid field and began to merge back into three large twinkling Oort clouds in close vicinity of Miki, Anne, and Fiore.

The shards condensed and spawned into humanoid forms. The three identical wireframe models were faceless and hairless, but they gave the distinct impression of handsome young men with lean and chiseled musculature, like a Stephenie Meyer scene painted by Syd Mead. But their most prominent feature was what they each beheld just below their toned hollow waistlines: Two miniature throbbing pulsars with a swirling vortex of questionable extending from the center.

The speechless figures secured their targets with cold and precalculated efficiency.

Anne's wireframe was placed on her back by the male wireframe nearest to her. Her legs were spread all the way up until her knees touched her chest and her ankles rested on the first male's shoulders. The second male wireframe laid flat on his back in front of Miki's wireframe. She looked from side to side like a confused mime as she was slowly dragged down until her thighs straddled dangerously close to the male figure's groin. Fiore's model put up a small fit as the third faceless male held her steady by her hips and routinely made her bend forward.

The silent male figures pushed up, forward, and down in swift and dutiful precision. Vectors collided and polygons meshed as Miki, Fiore, and Anne had required update code injected into their primary data ports.

The physical world reconstructed itself just as quickly as it had been destroyed. The glass pieces reappeared out of nothingness and reassembled into the sky, the ground, and the temple ruins. The Viking lord stood at the front of the temple with his arms crossed, his original appearance restored. There were no traces of the empty grid-world or its alien void-men.

The party members returned to their original physical forms with all of their equipment and clothing intact. Fidel, Emmerson, and Victor were still frozen in shock. Behind them, the women rose back to their feet with a soulless rhythm in their movements and an evil binary gleam in their eyes.

"What… the hell was that?" Victor said in disbelief.

Anne answered his question by calmly stepping behind him, yanking his head back by his hair, and slicing his neck open with one of the claws on her gauntlet. Emmerson and Fidel watched in terror as he drowned on his final breaths at Anne's feet. Anne gazed back at the two in utter silence, with tired circles around her eyes and a subtle smirk creeping across her lips.

Bright white auras appeared under Emmerson and Fidel's feet, and they suddenly felt their strength and vitality being halved. Miki used her medicinal artes to turn them into easy prey. Fiore moved in to finish them off.

Fidel rolled out of the way of a massive earth crag rising up from the ground to impale him. Fiore summoned spell after spell by waving the magic globe in her left hand. At the same time, she held the tip of her right index finger to her mouth and made seductive kissy motions with her lips.

Fidel survived flame pillars, tidal waves, and a landslide, but fatigue was setting in. Fiore could smell the beads of sweat pouring down the sides of his head with her keen alchemical senses.

The chain reaction that followed happened in around two and a half seconds. As Fidel parried to the left to avoid another fireball, his sweat droplets were sent flying to the right. Fiore clutched her crystal globe and purred, causing the three moistest, near-microscopic droplets to stop in midair and freeze into tiny ice arrows. She blew into her palm to send the free-floating arrows whistling back in the direction they had come. Fidel was stabbed through his neck, his jaw, and his temple. His eyes fluttered wide in reflex as he dropped over dead.

Emmerson avoided a meteor shower from Fiore and a fatal knockout punch from Anne. He thought he was in the clear, until he felt the solid steel of a healer's wand shatter the backs of his knees and he dropped straight on his back.

Stars filled Emmerson's vision as his mind tried to overcome the pain. When the stars faded, the shadowy silhouette of Miki's demented smiling face took their place. She was kneeling over his chest, blocking out the sunlight over him and holding her winged staff above her head with both of her hands. Her arms hung in the air for a short, haunting moment, and then she started swinging. Emmerson was still breathing for the first dozen strikes.

Miki giggled hysterically as she attacked, gleefully screaming "Delete! Delete! Delete!" in rhythm with the vicious beating. Each successive strike from the blunt end of her staff made Emmerson's face look a little bit more like a caved-in watermelon. His blood sprayed up and added a bright red blush to her cheeks.

The secret of the ruins was safe once the men of Fidel's party were vanquished. The women ascended the temple's stone columns and took their rightful places with the other Valkyries lining the gateway to Valhalla. They each took a different victorious pose as they slowly became frozen in flawless marble. The hot Yggdrasill seeds that swirled in their bellies made their one with the ancient universe, preserving their bodies in stone so that their flesh could be restored at the dawn of Ragnarok.

* * *

"Anti-viral activity detected in the Illvern Ruins sector."

A single Sphere Corporation employee read the message on his screen mundanely. He was only one in a wave of hundreds of workers fixated on their consoles in the dimly lit control room, each monitoring an infinitesimal fraction of the artificial Eternal Sphere universe.

"That's one of your domains, Welch," said a second employee at the station next to the first. "Can you check it out?"

One of SphereCo's system architects was sitting several consoles away, humming contently to herself as she chewed bubblegum, mixed sweet untz beatz, and worked on creating a perfect scaled replica of the IOI homeworld from _Ready Player One_ in Minecraft. She didn't react the first time her name was called.

" _ **Welch!**_ " the second technician shouted again.

"Okay, whatever!" Welch finally answered, shaking her short blonde pigtails in frustration.

She minimized the application window and punched in the credentials for her developer console. Raw source code filled her transparent screen from top to bottom. She skimmed through the seemingly incomprehensible text for a few seconds before she made her official diagnosis.

"Some nasty things were trying to break through the Gatekeeper program again. The defense system patched 'em up before they could do anything serious."

Welch shrugged in disinterest and returned to her 3D doodling.

* * *

 _Author's note: It sure seems to be getting spooky around here._


End file.
